Yes on Prop 19 - Tax & Control Cannabis

Yesterday, we learned that legalizing pot would give the state a financial shot in the arm. Today, we're learning that legalization could provide a significant boost to public safety, too.

That's the conclusion of a new study by the RAND Corporation, which examined the potential impacts of Prop 19. Chief among those effects would be "defunding" unregulated black markets like local drug dealers and cartels.

The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to support Proposition 19, despite some members' hesitation over the measure to legalize marijuana.

The push to legalize marijuana in California has borne witness to a bevy of strange sleeping arrangements. Medical marijuana dispensaries are now bedfellows with unions; retired law enforcement officers have linked arms with longhairs; and Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer have ditched their progressive stances on personal freedom in order to appear tough on crime, even as one of Boxer’s own staffers was arrested on Capitol Hill for possessing weed.

Proposition 19 presents California voters with a simple choice: Continue a policy that has failed completely, causes massive harm and can never work — or say yes to a common-sense approach that destroys a $14 billion black market run by violent thugs and replaces it with a legal, controlled market, all while eliminating enforcement costs and bringing in new tax revenue.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders told CNN Sunday she supports legalizing marijuana.

The trend-setting state of California is voting next month on a ballot initiative to legalize pot, also known as Proposition 19. The measure would legalize recreational use in the state, though federal officials have said they would continue to enforce drug laws in California if the initiative is approved.

Few non-criminals can accurately be described as "marijuana entrepreneurs," but that's what Richard Lee is.

Since California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, he's become something of a cannabis commerce don in Oakland, opening up legitimate (depending on whom you ask) businesses around the activity of weed smoking: in 1999 he opened the Bulldog Coffeeshop, which has doubled as a medical-marijuana vendor to card carriers, and in 2007 he founded Oaksterdam University, a college that will teach you how to grow and sell marijuana at campuses in Oakland, Sebastopol (an hour to the North), Los Angeles, and Flint, Michigan.

Eight local law professors are among a group of prominent legal educators urging the passage of a California ballot proposition that would remove criminal penalties for growing and using small amounts of marijuana.